Where have I been?

January 8, 2006

Life:

I think I’ve not been posting as often b/c I’ve been keeping a pen and paper journal in one of these. I’ve also developed a mild hobby of collecting some pens. The girl nicely got me a pilot-namiki vanishing point with a fine point nib. This pen writes wonderfully. I’ve been impressed w/just how comfortable it is to write with. I thought the clip being on top where you would normally grip would bother me but it doesn’t.

She also acquired a lamy accent in an extra fine nib for me for Xmas. Isn’t she nice? The lamy has an excellent weight and I’m still searching for just the right ink for it but it writes as well as her lamy safari does. Very distinct and pleasant line.

I’ve been riding my bike to work about 2-4 days a week (depending on weather and schedule). It’s been mostly good weather so far this winter and that’s been nice. I’ve also been reading some other bicycle commuting blogs.

The Bike Advocate – which, surprisingly, is written by someone I know who works in the Engineering School at duke, though I didn’t know that when I stumbled on the blog. She talks in a couple of posts about weight loss and obesity being combated by bicycle commuting. I’m afraid I’m not in that category. I’ve added some muscle in my legs but I’ve not, appreciably, lost any weight. Maybe in the spring when it warms up I will but as it stands I’m still a fatty.🙂

Scenes from A Bicycle – This guy has taken pictures along his commuting route. Bizarrely it is almost identical to my route and I have no idea who he is. I only recall seeing 2 or 3 other riders out in the mornings and they’re going the other way from me. Maybe that’s him.

Work:

Work has been re-implementing a lot of the infrastructure that we had in place in Physics before I left. It’s also going through and trying to define a bit of rigor in some practices I was not pleased with. Made some great strides, actually. There are a number of folks who are doing some good work and trying to make things saner than they were. It’s nice to see them, sometimes I think I don’t do much but bitch loudly enough that it let other folks be heard.

I’ve learned more about TSM than I really ever wanted to know and come up with some good results in both cases. I’m hoping that in 6 months from now we’ll be at a place in oit where we’ll be able to give more definitive and useful answers to questions about our infrastructure. This will pay out in spades when we go to ask for more people to get things done.

Yum:

Yum work has been slow over the last month or so. I’ve written a couple of plugins for the talk I’m giving at LCA in about 2 weeks. A bit nervous about that, too. I’ve worked on a new yum-util, (also for that talk) and that’s almost ready. Most of it is pacing the util so it makes sense for the talk, which is trickier than I thought it would be.

There’s still a number of things to do in yum and I’ve been putting a bunch of thought into the logging infrastructure over the last week, especially for providing syslog output. I think I know how to do it but I’m going to have to touch A LOT of code to make it happen. That should make for a fun patch set. I might make a compatibility layer for the log(), filelog() and errorlog() calls so that they’ll still work from all the random utils out there.

Fun stuff in yum: Jeremy and Paul have been doing lots of new things. I know jeremy has made s-c-p work properly with the yum backend and pup appears to be doing the right thing these days. I kinda want to have time to sit down and play with the capplet python support and python dbus bindings to try and work out a notification applet that’s light weight and just gets events from a daemon that updates the metadata. We’ve talked about it before and I think it could be done in reasonably small amounts of time but it will take sitting down and doing it. Just another thing on my wishlist, I guess.